Cisco Expands SDN Offerings With ACI, NX-OS Enhancements

Cisco also is introducing the VTS for service providers looking for a programmable fabric. VTS is a data center overlay provisioning and management system for Cisco's stand-alone Nexus fabric. It supports overlays across the vendor's entire Nexus switch portfolio—from the 2000 to the 9000 gear—and the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) EVPN for managing VXLAN overlays.
The company earlier this year introduced BGP EVPN on the Nexus 9000 switches and now is extending it to the 5600 and 7000 series switches in the second half of the year, according to Jeff Reed, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Enterprise Infrastructure and Solutions Group.
"This is really fundamental for multi-tenant cloud environments," such as those run by service providers, Reed told eWEEK, adding that VTS will run on any switch that supports BGP EVPN.
For mega-scale data centers, Cisco is introducing a NX-OS release for the Nexus 9000 and 3000 switches that Jensen said is designed to be open. Features of the new release, which is due out in the third quarter, include enhancements to its NX-API, such as object store and model-driven API support. There also is native third-party application integration of development tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible and Ganglia; Linux utilities support for tool integration across compute and network; and a software-development kit (SDK) for custom application integration.

In addition, later this year Cisco will introduce a common NX-API for all of its Nexus switch portfolios.

The two new Nexus 3000 switches for mega-scale data centers and cloud environments include the Nexus 3232C, a 1U (1.75-inch) 32-port spine-and-leaf switch that is powered by Broadcom's Tomahawk silicon and can support port speeds ranging from 10G and 25G to 40G, 50G and 100G. The 3264R is a 2U (3.5-inch) 64-port switch that supports speeds of 10G and 40G that also comes in a spine-and-leaf design. The switches will be available in the third quarter starting at $35,000.